By now you’ve probably heard about the recent Zogby Interactive poll on the importance of citizen journalism:

A majority of Americans (55%) in an online survey said bloggers are important to the future of American journalism and 74% said citizen journalism will play a vital role…Most respondents (53%) also said the rise of free Internet-based media pose the greatest opportunity to the future of professional journalism and three in four (76%) said the Internet has had a positive impact on the overall quality of journalism.

That citizen journalism will be important in the changing media landscape should be nothing new. That it poses “the greatest opportunity to the future of professional journalism” is probably a relief to those who aren’t aware it yet.

The imputes to realizing this is seeing real working models (something we are working on at NewAssignment.Net). In the meantime, here’s a new project from Personal Democracy Forum called techPresident.

Run by a motley crew of journalists and bloggers the site will monitor how the 2008 presidential candidates are using the Web. And it will include the following crowdsourced features.

A searchable repository of emails from each campaign [to come]
Up-down voting on each candidate’s use of the Web [to come]
Live from-the-campaign-trail photo feeds created by voters

Crowdsourcing isn’t about cost-cutting. It won’t be a fallback position after all professional journalists are fired. And any attempt to do this by a news organization will probably be scrutinized to death, as was the case last week when KFTY-TV in Santa Rosa moved to “local content harvesting.”

Citizen journalism isn’t about exploitation or content sharecropping. It’s a means to engage readers/participants and enhance the news. Journalists are still needed, more as guides than gatekeepers, but needed none-the-less. Job descriptions might change, but that just means its gut-check time. Are we in the business to run around, take notes, and write out information or to manage the conduit for public debate, often called the fourth estate?

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David Cohn is the editor of NewAssignment.Net’s blog.